Can the new CEO help the Glenbow move forward?

Jeremy Klaszus, Swerve09.27.2013

Can new CEO Donna Livingstone lasso the Glenbow?Andy Nichols
/ Swerve

Among other things, the Donna Livingstone also co-owns a toy shop; she’s right at home behind the scenes in a seventh-floor storage area with some items from the museum’s collection of vintage toys.Andy Nichols
/ Swerve

Glenbow founder Eric Harvie had interests that went far beyond the Canadian West. The “Victorian cabinet of curiosities” contains medieval military items, too.Andy Nichols
/ Swerve

This ram’s head snuff mull is part of the Glenbow’s vast Cultural History Collection. Members of a Highland regiment would have used it to pass around the smokeless tobacco after dinner.Andy Nichols
/ Swerve

Boxed piano rolls once played on a piano player line storage shelves in the Cultural History Collection, which boasts more than 100,000 objects.Andy Nichols
/ Swerve

Donna Livingstone knows how to rope people into a story. After writing a book on Calgary Stampede founder and vaudevillian Guy Weadick in the mid-’90s, she figured she ought to promote it with Weadick-style flair. In the book, Livingstone describes how Weadick and his partner, Florence LaDue, would perform a 15-minute act involving rope tricks: “Guy and Florence would send large rope loops spinning in the air, then jump through the coils or twist the long ropes into knots.” Livingstone didn’t want to just say this aloud at book readings; she wanted to show it. So she set about learning a couple rope tricks from a retired calf roper. By the time the book came out, Livingstone could twirl the rope and step in and out of the spinning loop while telling Weadick’s story.

The act suited the owner of a popular local toy business. Donna is the Livingstone in Livingstone & Cavell Extraordinary Toys, the Kensington shop she owns with her husband, fellow museum curator and author Edward Cavell. Livingstone is still focused on connecting past with present, but nowadays she’s got far more than book sales on the line. In May, she became president and CEO of Glenbow Museum, taking the reins after several years of tumult inside the organization. The recession hit, staff got laid off, fundraising went down, deficits ballooned well beyond $1 million annually and two CEOs, Jeffrey Spalding and Kirstin Evenden, resigned abruptly with little explanation. Not yet 50 years old, Glenbow Museum appeared to be in disarray, casting about for a vision for its future. “Their mandate may have been clear to them, but it wasn’t clear to the community,” says local heritage expert Blane Hogue. “You’d talk to different people, either at board level or at management level, and you would get a different answer each time.”

Livingstone had been on the board since 2008, while working as director of University of Calgary Press. After Evenden resigned last year, Livingstone put her name forward to calm things down in the interim. She had worked at the Glenbow in the ’80s and ’90s, and felt that bringing in somebody who didn’t know the place would be unwise. “The mood was fragile,” she says. “Staff, volunteers, the board and everyone in the community—we were all hurting. I think we wanted it to work, and we felt that things had gone sideways.”

In May, after an international search, Livingstone was appointed president and CEO. She wasn’t an art-world rock star like Spalding, but she’d led other non-profit organizations through difficult changes, stabilizing them after periods of decline. Here was a chance to apply that experience to a place she knew and loved. “She can’t be praised too highly for what she is doing,” says Hugh Dempsey, Glenbow’s chief curator emeritus. “Whether or not she’ll be successful—time will tell, because she has large hurdles to overcome.”

Among museums, Glenbow Museum is an oddity. From its name you wouldn’t guess that it boasts the largest art collection in Western Canada, but Glenbow is a museum, art gallery, library and archives all rolled into one. For this we can thank Eric Harvie, the Ontario-born oilman and philanthropist who hired collectors in the ’50s and ’60s to gather artifacts, art and historical documents related to the Canadian West. His interests went beyond this area, however, and he travelled the world collecting everywhere from Cochrane to Cameroon. “In the early days of Glenbow, that multiplicity of stories was its great attraction, because we were formed as the Victorian cabinet of curiosities,” says Livingstone. “You could discover things about samurai armour, your grandma’s wedding dress, contemporary art and ranching saddles, and that was exciting.” In 1966, Harvie gave the entire mishmash to the people of Alberta along with $5 million, and the Glenbow Museum was born.

Like Harvie, Livingstone grew up outside of Alberta. She spent her childhood on a remote B.C. island without electricity where her father was a fisherman. After graduating from a Pacific studies program at the University of Victoria, she moved to High River with her first husband and quickly felt at home among local ranchers. To her they were like fishermen in many ways: independent thinkers with an ability to read land and sky. She was drawn to that world and to Glenbow, which hired her in 1988 to handle its public relations. Through the job, she got to write a lot about the West and familiarize herself with Glenbow’s collections. “She stood out even at that time as a bright light,” recalls Dempsey. “She approached everything with enthusiasm—enthusiasm coupled with intelligence.” By the time Livingstone left Glenbow in 1998, she had become VP of programs and exhibitions.

In the decade that followed, she led several heritage, science and education organizations that were starting out or struggling to survive. The Western Heritage Centre in Cochrane was both, suffering from low attendance and debt. Livingstone got hired on a contract in 1998 to turn the fledgling organization around, and set about cutting costs, reorganizing it from a full-time operation to a seasonal one. She also wanted to get the story right; in her mind, you couldn’t just talk about the past and expect people to come through the doors. You had to connect it to the present somehow. To Livingstone, this meant exploring contemporary issues like range management. “The story wasn’t ‘What would Senator [Matthew Henry] Cochrane have done 100 years ago?’” she says of the rancher/politician for whom Cochrane is named. “It’s ‘How would he manage that land today?’” By the time her 18-month contract was up, she had cut a $1-million debt in half. (The facility has since been converted into the Cochrane RancheHouse, which is Cochrane’s town hall and an events centre.)

In 2003, Livingstone landed at another troubled organization, the H.R. MacMillan Space Centre in Vancouver. It had been around for 35 years, its exhibits were aging, audiences were losing interest and the organization was unsure of what it wanted to be. Here, as in Cochrane, she looked at the story that was there—in this case, the night sky—and set about renewing it.

“Instead of just telling the Western story of the night sky, Galileo and all that, we introduced a program involving First Nations perspective of the night sky, which was extremely different,” Livingstone recalls.

Another program focused on sustainability and care for our own planet, a story that resonated in eco-friendly Vancouver.

In 2008, Livingstone returned to Calgary to become director of University of Calgary Press. Under her leadership the press adopted a new vision: “Making a difference. Making you think.” The press became more selective in what it published. Livingstone also led the press’s transition to open-access publishing so books were available online as free PDFs. “My argument was, why don’t we change the paradigm?” she says. “Why don’t we prove that if you publish open access and everybody has access to it, your reach and impact is going to be larger than publishing 500 copies that are sold to your parents?” Sales of hard-copy books stayed more or less the same after the move and in some cases increased, she says. In 2012, the press won Publisher of the Year at the Alberta Book Awards for the quality of its catalogue and its leadership on open-access publishing. She recently completed an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, which she used to complete her first novel.

If one looks at Livingstone’s career, she seems to bring the same questions to all her work: What is our core story? How do we make it more relevant and accessible? What is needless and can go? “She’s really good at seeing that next step,” says longtime friend and Glenbow senior librarian Lindsay Moir. By the time Livingstone returned to Glenbow, the museum badly needed answers to these questions. “The advantage I have is that I know there are certain cycles that Glenbow has gone through,” says Livingstone. “And because I’ve been involved in other organizations, I know what stage we’re at in terms of change—and what needs to be done.”

What is the Glenbow’s story? The Smithsonian in Washington D.C. is sometimes referred to as America’s attic, and Hogue thinks of the Glenbow as Southern Alberta’s attic, the repository of our Western heritage. Others see the Glenbow as too conservative, too dull, and long for a bolder visual arts direction.

The place has always reflected Harvie’s broad interests and over the years under different leaders the institution’s focus has sometimes swung back and forth between its arts and heritage elements. “To now steward that really vast mandate—there are a lot of challenges there,” says Melanie Kjorlien, Glenbow’s VP of access, collections and exhibitions. “The collections are so diverse that it’s tried to be a lot of different things to many different people.”

Furthermore, with too few staff, the museum struggles to properly maintain the vast collections, which include more than a million artifacts and 28,000-plus works of art. The museum’s worn carpets, dated interior and faded placards on the exterior of the building tell a story of their own. “They are so hampered by shortage of staff and shortage of funds and so on, they can’t even come close to living up to the type of commitments that I’m sure Eric Harvie foresaw,” says Dempsey.

The Glenbow gets roughly a third of its funding from the province, and relies heavily on fundraising, investments and admissions to make up the difference. “We take a much more entrepreneurial approach than a lot of museums or galleries just because we have to,” says Livingstone. But consecutive deficit budgets have taken their toll. Hours have shrunk. The museum is closed Mondays, and on the sixth floor, where researchers dig through the archives and library to share the stories of this area, access has been squeezed down to three days a week. Novelist Fred Stenson, who has written about the changing West from the fur trade onward, is one of many artists whose work has been directly shaped by the materials on that floor. “Without knowing what was in there, I probably wouldn’t have selected the novel subjects that I did,” he says. Reduced hours make it harder for people like Stenson to share these stories.

On the lower floors of the museum, visitors pass through exhibitions on subjects ranging from Blackfoot culture and military history to mineralogy and modernist art. Some of the permanent exhibitions have been around so long they are nearly “welded in place,” says Livingstone. This works for tourists and the 40,000-plus schoolchildren who visit Glenbow annually on field trips, but return visitors often skip these exhibitions altogether—or worse, don’t come back at all. Dempsey identifies two common responses when you ask somebody in town about the museum. “Either somebody says, ‘Oh yes, I went there as a kid. I remember that. It was a very nice experience.’ Or: ‘Oh yes. My uncle is visiting and we’re taking him around to the zoo and Heritage Park and Glenbow.’ You don’t find too many people who say, ‘We’ve got a Sunday afternoon off, let’s all go to the Glenbow.’” Twenty years ago, around 200,000 people a year came to Glenbow. Total attendance last year was 117,681.

Livingstone knows the permanent exhibitions need refreshing. Changing exhibitions have more pull nowadays. No Roads Here: Corb Lund’s Alberta, which was on display earlier this year, is a good example. The singer curated the show, picking eight of his songs and compiling artifacts and stories around the songs’ themes, including gambling, rodeo and Mormonism. Lund’s fan base flocked to the exhibition; it also enabled Glenbow to look at its collections from an outsider’s point of view, and see them in a new way. Livingstone envisions more of these kinds of exhibitions to bring the museum’s collections to life.

Another example is the current Made in Calgary exhibition. The show looks at Calgary’s visual arts decade by decade. Earlier this month, Glenbow launched the ’80s exhibition, which is curated by Spalding, and threw a 1980s-themed party complete with music, shoulder pads and big hair. “It was packed,” says Livingstone. “There were almost 800 people. They weren’t just coming to see the show—they were responding to the show. That’s more than just saying, ‘Here’s a bunch of art.’”

This kind of event is a big component of Livingstone’s vision. She wants to stop the pendulum swinging of the past, where the organization’s focus has moved between different elements of its operations. “In a lot of ways it’s not really about whether we’re a library, an archives, museum or art gallery,” she says. “It’s about what kind of experience people have when they come to Glenbow.”

When Hogue, who was executive director of Lougheed House for seven years, heard of Livingstone’s appointment as CEO, he was relieved. “When somebody gets appointed, what you want from the community is everybody to go: ‘Of course! What a great appointment.’ And that’s what happened,” says Hogue, who is on the board of the Alberta Museums Association. In the years prior, when people asked what he hoped Glenbow would be, he’d respond dryly with one word: open. Now he’s more optimistic.

“She’s viewed as very competent. She will be able to articulate the vision for the future of the Glenbow. Up until now, I think that’s what was missing.”

Earlier this month, the Glenbow revealed that it had cut its deficit by $1.2 million this year, to just under $400,000. In part, this is because staff that were laid off weren’t replaced. It’s been a challenging year for remaining staff. “We’re still a very busy museum,” says Doug Cass, Glenbow’s director of library and archives. “In my area, we’re continuing to be one of the busiest archives in the country. To do all that with fewer staff has been very difficult.”

That said, Cass and other staff are hopeful about the future. In the coming months, Glenbow plans on unveiling its new direction, along with a rebranding exercise to refresh its public image. Past Glenbow leaders have dreamed of new facilities, of filling the city’s biggest cultural arts gap and building a stand-alone contemporary art gallery (this was planned even as deficits climbed past $1 million). While Livingstone says the Glenbow’s art collection will be central to its future, she floats no dreams of large capital projects. The Glenbow appears to be staying put in its aging Brutalist building on Stephen Avenue, at least for now. “People have agonized over it over the years and there’s been a cult of new buildings and all that,” she says. “I think we’re exactly where we need to be, in the heart of the downtown.”

The building was originally set up to take in people from 9th Avenue, and there are plans for improved street-level presence on Stephen Avenue to attract more visitors. Livingstone believes that once the museum’s new direction is revealed, it will bring in more people. “I feel this is where the West lives,” says Livingstone.

“Now my job, as I see it, is to take the West of the past and provide that meaning to people today, giving them a sense of place that they can carry forward.”

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